4. Resource-Based Economy (RBE): A Vision for a Promethean Eutopia

4.1. Concept Overview

A «resource-based economy» (RBE) refers to a theorized post-capitalist economic arrangement which is characterized by technological post-scarcity, intelligent cooperation, common access and widespread automation and lacks any system of debt, barter or servitude. The concept is a product of futurological studies of the second half of the 20th century and the term has been adapted from the idea of resource-based communities of the Antigonish Movement and alludes to the proposal to return to an economic system of pure physical resources without the involvement of artificial currencies or speculation. Today this kind of futuristic model is promoted by various online advocacy groups such as the Buckminster Fuller Institute, the Zeitgeist Movement and the Auravana Project to name a few.

The concept includes the following fundamental proposals:

1) The full application of advanced manufacturing technology in order to produce unprecedentedlevels of abundance in all areas and supply the material demands of whole communities

High-tech production has proven to be many times more efficient than traditional methods. It is responsible for the great increase of productivity and abundance in the last century. Technology will continue to evolve. Productive capacity will continue to increase. Eventually, it will be possible to produce all essential commodities so superabundantly as to eliminate all conditions of scarcity. Of course, the attainment of such an economic condition would ultimately render the current market system obsolete for the most part.

2) Community-owned systems of production

Agricultural complexes and factories will be owned and directed by communities through localized governing councils. Production will serve solely to satisfy human needs directly rather than the financial interests of private corporations. The economy will no longer be beholden to an inefficient market system which inevitably creates artificial scarcity and raises the pursuit of profit above the supply of real demands.

3) Common access to goods and facilities

All people will have access to their material demands free of charge. Systems of usership will replace most forms of private ownership. There will be in every town or district public commons of goods from which residents may borrow specialized items on a temporary basis. Everybody will benefit from a new social system of communitywide shared abundance.

4) Automation of production

The industrial operations of civilization will be automated substantially through advanced robotic and cybernetic systems and human labor will be minimized to the extent possible. People will be liberated from the greater part of the drudgery of the present social order. The notion of employment for income itself will come to an end.

5) Abolition of systems of fiat currency

In light of the attainment of post-scarcity and the advent of a post-market economic system, the concept of money as a medium of exchange will cease to hold relevance. Systems of common access nullify the need for buying and selling and the deliberate phasing out of labor through automation makes the idea of wages as a source of incentive completely superfluous.

4.2. Discussion

The concept of a RBE society constitutes an authentic heterodox way which transcends the outmoded assumptions of both capitalism and the various socialist ideologies and offers a totally revolutionary mode of life. It proposes to harness the most advanced manufacturing technologies of our age and design community-based systems of production in order to rise above the need for private commerce and create a new arrangement of shared abundance in the fashion of a «gift economy». In this regard it may resemble socialism. Nevertheless, unlike the current ideologies of the left, this futuristic model advocates for the reduction of the need for human labor and the abolition of the current notion of employment through a program of deliberate automation, which supposes an outright rejection of the socialist pro-work ideology. This vision is detached from any conventional political notion. Its only philosophy is the scientific method and the intelligent use of technology.

This type of society is without doubt a radical proposal which differs significantly from the established order of debt and commerce of the last 300 years. The shortsighted masses and the cynical naysayers will surely raise their heads to scoff at us and disregard our Eutopian ideal as a ridiculous pipe dream. However, we who are more lucid thinkers and more versed in the topic of futurological possibilities understand that the course of civilization is neither statis nor fixed but rather dynamic and evolutionary. History has taught us that nothing ever remains the same. Technology advances. Values change. The world tends to undergo revolutionary metamorphoses every couple of centuries. The society of today is very different from the society of the Renaissance or that of the Middle Ages. Likewise, the society of the upcoming centuries will be very different from that of today. Although the ruling elites would like to make us believe that there can be no other system that functions except their own and that we have reached the end of history á la Francis Fukuyama, we recognize that the world is volatile and that the future is radical.

We maintain that the introduction of a RBE system is highly feasible. Even a brief observation of the general trends of the new century will reveal that many of its fundamental requirements are already being increasingly fulfilled. First, the technological advancements of recent decades have served to generate unprecedented levels of material abundance at ever lower costs. It is not an exaggeration to say that a realizable condition of technological post-scarcity is already on the horizon. A RBE system would simply continue this trend within the context of community-based production and common access without the hindrance of the capitalist market. Second, the acceleration of automation in all sectors of the economy is doing away with many forms of employment. Now machines are able to perform the greater part of productive operations with a level of efficiency greater than that of any man and human labor is becoming increasingly obsolete. A RBE system would simply encourage this accelerating process as a desired source of liberation instead of fighting against it. The only problem which impedes our transition is that the world remains limited by the illusory assumptions of certain stubborn ideologies.

Some people will display a knee-jerk reaction of hostility towards the idea of a RBE society based on a system of community-based production and common access. It is inevitable that many people of a right-wing bent will conflate it with vulgar Soviet-style socialism. However, a RBE society diverges considerably from these left-wing ideologies. First, this futuristic model rejects explicitly the mindless glorification of proletarian life characteristic of socialist states and promotes instead a philosophy of anti-work, that is to say, an intention to reduce the need for work to an absolute minimum through the application of automated systems. Work is despised as an affront to human dignity and leisure and individual freedom are exalted. Second, this new vision opposes the excessive statism and the ideological dictatorship of socialist states and supports instead an widespread system of political localism and a rather libertarian ethos that maximizes our freedom. People will not be forced to perform tasks that they don't want to do since the condition of technological post-work will do away with the notion of employment. Everybody will enjoy freedom of movement and freedom of expression. All victimless «crimes» will be decriminalized. We wish to transcend the limits of capitalism and socialism and build in their place something much more relevant.

Our version of the RBE concept distinguishes itself from other projects of this futurological current such as the Zeitgeist Movement which tend to be rather mechanistic in their interpretation of the world in the sense that ours includes an important humanistic aspect and transcendental ideals. It is not based solely on the modern ideal of utilitarianism. We synthesize the model with our own neo-aristocratic philosophy and place emphasis on the encouragement of human excellence and the relative aristocratization of the whole of humanity in the wake of the achievement of a society of technological post-scarcity and widespread automation. Some of our deepest inspirations are the classical values and the aretegenic ethos of the time of the Renaissance. We wish to create a higher form of civilization in which people are able to live lives of great human flourishing and unbridled artistic creativity and thereby forge themselves into an ever more godlike superhumanity with the same «Promethean Fire».

4.3. Technological Ephemeralization: From Scarcity to Abundance

The traditional market system is predicated on the factor of scarcity--a strictly limited supply of goods and services relative to their commercial demand. It is precisely the scarcity of any given resource that gives it its respective value in the marketplace.

When a particular commodity is in short supply and difficult to obtain, its market price will remain high and it will continue to be profitable. On the other hand, when that same commodity is produced on a massive scale and becomes widely available, logically its market price will decrease and it will become more affordable. However, when the commodity becomes superabundant and surpasses the limit of scarcity, it will no longer be profitable at all. It would be impossible to sell something as superabundant and freely available as grains of sand in the desert, ice in Siberia or coconuts on a sparsely populated Polynesian island. Scarcity is an inbuilt and inseparable feature of the capitalist market economy.

Under the capitalist system, corporate monopolies often restrict the production and supply of certain goods and thereby induce or maintain scarcity deliberately. This phenomenon is known as «artificial scarcity». Such a strategy allows the producer to continue to charge high prices for his products. It gives him the opportunity to maintain the relevance of his companies in the marketplace and conserve a condition of high profitability.

Capitalism is an anti-economy. It is more concerned with the pursuit of profit (i.e., artificial value) than with the fulfillment of the material needs of human communities. Although today many food products can be produced superabundantly due to modern technological innovations in agriculture and distribution, corporations often demand the deliberate destruction of crops and livestock in the event of overproduction for the purpose of maintaining a high level of profitability. This is because an overflow of a certain good into the market would only drive down its value dramatically and therefore ruin business. In this age of realizable technological abundance, the traditional market system becomes nothing more than an unnecessary obstacle and an enemy of efficiency.

In a RBE system, on the other hand, our highly developed manufacturing technology of the 21st century will be fully applied across all sectors of production in order to produce levels of abundance relative to the material demands of whole communities and thereby give rise to a new condition of post-scarcity in which the majority of goods and services may be supplied freely without any system of debt or barter.

High-tech production has proven to be infinitely more productive than traditional human effort. It undeniably accounts for the ever increasing availability of essential commodities and even many kinds of luxury goods in recent decades. Automation not only reduces labor costs to a minimum and produces much greater volume at a much faster rate but also economizes the use of raw materials and improves the precision and quality of any productive operation. Our manufacturing technology will continue to advance. New methods of production will be developed. Eventually, and perhaps sooner rather than later, our technological productive capacity will reach such a level of efficiency that it will simply be possible to make most kinds of products freely available to all people in the fashion of a «gift economy». Such a condition is termed by futurists a «post-scarcity economy».

In a RBE system, the primary means of production will be controlled directly by the elected councils of our communities and not by private corporations. Production will be motivated solely by the intention to supply human needs. It will no longer be compromised by the counterproductive profit motive inherent in the present capitalist market system. Agricultural complexes will provide all the food products that the town or district requires without intermediaries such as commercial supermarkets. Factories will manufacture a variety of consumer goods in abundance and make them directly available for human consumption without a price tag. The concept of a market economy will fade into oblivion. Profit will no longer be a driving factor. Artificial scarcity will come to an end.

In a RBE system, all people are entitled to the benefits of a new social arrangement of common access to resources and communitywide shared abundance. Intelligent cooperation will replace the mindless dog-eat-dog mentality of the market economy. Public commons projects will enrich human societies to a much greater degree than the monopolistic organizations of today could ever do. Our world might even begin to resemble an actual civilization.

Food Production

Communities (towns, suburbs and urban residential districts) will include their own public agricultural complexes consisting of industrial greenhouses and multi-deck hydroponic farming towers. These facilities will be highly automated and serve to supply the alimentary demands of the whole community with minimal need for human labor. Everything will be localized. There will no longer be any need to import food products from faraway regions.

Controlled-environment agriculture (CEA) will become the prominent mode of cultivation and largely replace traditional agricultural methods due to its many advantages. Indoor farming is not only more efficient but is also unrestricted by climatic factors and reduces the environmental destruction associated with soil-based agriculture. It will be possible to cultivate tropical fruits even in the cold northern regions of the planet. Communities will be able to erect multi-deck hydroponic farming towers in any place where there is electricity. There will be very few real limitations in the field of agriculture and crop failure and famine will be a thing of the past.

Communities will produce an abundance of healthful and nutrient-dense fruits, vegetables and cereals of many varieties without the toxic chemical additives and other contaminants typical of the food products of the corporate supermarkets of today. Food products will be immediately stored in public dispensaries from which residents may take whatever they require. Nothing will ever be wasted. Nobody will ever be hungry simply because they don't have enough money.

Finally, with the shift towards indoor farming, much of the countryside will be left to regenerate naturally. This will allow for a return to traditional practices of hunting and gathering for those who are carnivorous by nature or who prefer a more primitive lifestyle. As a sidenote, the ignoble practice of industrial livestock production will no longer exist under our Eutopian order. We are opposed to all forms of animal cruelty. I myself advocate vegetarianism as a preferred lifestyle, but those who wish to eat meat will be permitted to hunt for food. Hunting is a much more ethical form of carnivorism.

Housing

Every community will include its own public housing project. New housing complexes will be erected en masse and wherever necessary using innovative modular prefab building techniques which are naturally much faster and less labor-intensive than traditional building methods. These public dwellings will serve as new homes for anybody who requires a place to live. Access to them will be based on a system of usufruct: the right to enjoy the benefits of the property of another (in this case public property) for a duration limited to full and adequate use. Shelter will become a universal right.

Most human settlements, particularly those located in rural regions, will allocate a certain area of their land for personal allotments or community gardens where families and individuals may cultivate their own fruits and vegetables and raise their own animals. Of course, such a practice is not absolutely necessary given the existence of much more efficient public agricultural complexes as mentioned in the previous subsection. However, there are many people who simply enjoy a horticultural lifestyle and have always dreamed of having their own garden or plot of land. Once again, access will be based on a system of usufruct.

Most towns and cities will also feature a Visitors' Quarter where voyagers and tourists may sojourn freely for limited periods of time. Hospitality is a great virtue in all cultures.

The transition to a RBE system will most likely bring about a tendency towards deurbanization as many people, now liberated from the need to pursue employment, choose to leave the overcrowded and polluted big cities and resettle in smaller cities, towns and idyllic rural areas depending on their individual preferences. In truth, many big cities only exist as centers of finance, commerce and employment and would no longer be necessary in a moneyless society. They are also completely unnatural and highly hazardous to human health. Millions of urbanites will happily abandon their dystopian concrete jungles and participate in a great return to nature.

Energy

Renewable energy sources will supersede the current energy industries which are predominantly reliant on harmful fossil fuels. New technologies will be developed in order to tap into the many natural reserves available to us on this planet. Clean energy will supply electricity to the high-tech systems of our Eutopian civilization and also to the homes of all of our people free of charge.

In truth, there is no real energy crisis. Our planet contains many superabundant energy sources that could be easily tappable with improved technologies. The real problem is that such developments are almost always hindered by the established energy monopolies which desire to keep energy scarce and therefore profitable, even if that means to continue to burn outmoded fossil fuels until ruining the environment beyond repair.

Geothermal Power will be a major energy source. It has been reported that at least 2000 zettajoules could be tapped with improved technology, and with about half a zettajoule being equal to the annual energy consumption of the whole planet, this medium could supply all the energy needs of our planetary civilization for at least 4000 years. However, it is also understood that Geothermal Power renews itself constantly.

Solar Power will be another great option. Simple photovoltaic panels will be built into the roofs of many buildings and full-scale solar power plants will harness the sun's radiation and convert it into an inexhaustible abundance of energy.

Wind Power, Wave Power and Tidal Power will also be exploited in the right environments. Turbines will be constructed in the highlands, in the larger rivers and in the underwater currents of the oceans. These will be able to generate additional energy.

Consumer Goods

Many commodities such as clothes, footwear, household appliances and electronic devices will be manufactured in local automated factories in proportion to demand and supplied to people directly through public dispensaries. All products will be designed optimally. Automobiles, household appliances and electronic devices will be built with efficiency and durability. Planned obsolescence will be obsolete and all forms of unnecessary squandering of natural materials will be eliminated.

There will be a general shift towards systems of common access to goods, spaces and facilities. Every community will feature its own public goods library, similar to a regular public library, where people may agree to borrow a wide variety of specialized items on a temporary basis. These will include things such as high-quality cameras, specialized tools, sporting equipment and exotic vehicles. Such a public commons of goods will not only cut back on a lot of unnecessary waste and economic inefficiency but will also serve to enrich the lives of everybody.

Computers and other devices will be designed with ease of updates and cross-compatibility in mind. There will no longer be any need for thousands of substandard, obsolescent and mutually incompatible models of the same product spanning multiple commercial brands. Rather the foremost experts and innovators will unite their forces via open source platforms and create just a handful of optimal versions, all totally cross-compatible and with virtually unlimited updatability.

3D Printing, also known as Additive Manufacturing, is expected to evolve dramatically in the upcoming decades. It will be possible to print many useful items or individual parts with such technology. Every public goods library will most likely include also a public workshop with 3D Printers and catalogs of many predesigned blueprints.

Information and Digital Media

The Internet, which has totally revolutionized many aspects of human society and constitutes an unprecedented medium of knowledge, data transfer, communication and entertainment, will be made freely available to all human beings. Local communications centers will supply network access to towns and cities. New dwellings and public spaces will include inbuilt network access points. The Internet will be even more ubiquitous.

The world will witness a new phase of the Digital Age. Open source data sharing will reach even greater heights and everybody will benefit from a condition of universal access and mediatic abundance. All kinds of books, videos, audio files and educational materials will be accessible to all people in virtually unlimited public digital libraries without copyright restrictions. These will include an infinite amount of rare publications, movies, soundtracks and videogames, both old and new and all stored in optimal and cross-compatible formats.

Education will become more autodidactic. More people will educate themselves through their own computers and cellphones. Online learning portals will provide access to all of the best and most up-to-date textbooks and a variety of high-quality research journals and impart advanced knowledge concerning all areas of study from science and engineering to philosophy and the arts. The society of the future will place great importance on the enlightenment of its people.

Web hosting will be free and unlimited and open source creative commons platforms will continue to evolve. Creative individuals will take full advantage of these developments. Thinkers will make their ideas known in their own webspaces as they already do so today. Writers will share their novels in digital formats throughout public literature platforms. Artists will showcase their works of art in online public art galleries. Musicians and filmmakers will publish their music and homemade movies in soundtrack databases and video hosting services similar to YouTube. In truth, many of these kinds of platforms already exist today, but in the RBE system of the future they will all be totally free and much more universal.

4.4. Across-the-board Automation: From Servitude to Freedom

Automated machines are replacing human employees in all major industries and even the service sector at an ever increasing rate. It has become much cheaper and more efficient to get rid of expensive and inefficient human labor and automate a wide variety of productive operations. As a result, modern societies have begun to show abnormally high levels of unemployment in recent decades. This trend is known as «technological unemployment». Work, in its traditional sense, has become somewhat meaningless in today's high-tech world.

Unfortunately, this development has still not resulted in an increase of leisure and freedom though. In fact, it has only had the opposite effect. As automation advances, more people are simply taken away from productive industries and pushed into newly created non-productive and superfluous occupations which in all honesty provide no real value to society while other people join the unemployment line and are forced to search for jobs that don't exist (and don't need to exist) in order to receive welfare payments. In the end, the modern world remains as work-sick as ever.

Why have we not seen a significant reduction of the workweek and the introduction of a new lifestyle of greater leisure and free time despite the obvious liberatory power of automation?

First, modern society continues to be pervaded by a morbid spirit of puritan moralism, albeit in a secularized form. The moralists of labor remain highly vocal. They still wish to push the backward notion that every man must earn a living through the sweat of his brow and that human existence requires a 40 hour workweek of drudgery in order to possess dignity. Such people lament the trend of technological unemployment (i.e., freedom from toil) as a great tragedy and call for the creation of new forms of work regardless of their absurdity.

Second, the corporate elite is determined to preserve the cyclical worker-consumer paradigm in order to maintain its economic hegemony. People need an income in order to purchase the products and services of the corporations. Too much unemployment would ultimately starve the economic system from which the corporate elite derives its great advantage. Therefore, many superfluous occupations are simply created out of nothing with the sole purpose of keeping a large part of the population employed and able to earn a paycheck. In truth, people are only working for the continued survival of the same system which enslaves them.

Third, the corporate elite understands that the 40 hour workweek serves as an effective tool for the sustainment of the present culture of extreme consumerism. When people are constantly stressed and overworked and have very few hours of free time, they are more likely to spend indulgently on conveniences and fleeting moments of hedonistic escapism. This obviously equals profit for the corporations which promote this kind of lifestyle. In truth, the dystopian architects don't want people to have freedom and begin to develop artistic passions because they know that people with many passions and interests would no longer want to work relentlessly and consume excessively.

In a RBE system, on the other hand, automation will be implemented across the board and all forms of human labor will be minimized deliberately. Repetitious jobs in manufacturing and warehousing will be the first to disappear. The productive operations of whole factories will be performed by tireless and efficient robots as manned production lines become a thing of the past. Eventually, many of the more complex fields such as construction, medicine and surgery will be revolutionized by new automative technologies. The evolving application of machines and computers will continue to reduce the intensity of labor. Technological unemployment—a major social problem under the current capitalist system—will be reinterpreted as a desirable outcome and society will begin to value leisure and freedom. In the end, as much as 90% of all labor will be fully automated and the average workweek will be reduced to a mere fraction of what it is today.

In a RBE system, the whole notion of «employment for income» will become obsolete. Therefore, the myriad non-productive and superfluous occupations, those which only exist to serve the financial interests of the present corporatocracy or otherwise keep people employed and able to obtain a salary, will be purged out of existence immediately. All jobs related to finance will be made redundant. All employees of the advertising industry will find that their skills of manipulation are no longer relevant. Insurance firms will vanish from the face of the planet. Bloated bureaucracies and ridiculous HR departments will be cast eternally into the abyss of oblivion. Millions of psychologically abused wage slaves will be emancipated from their boring corporate prisons and allowed to enjoy a more relaxed lifestyle and pursue with great enthusiasm their own passions and interests. Society as a whole will seek to minimize working hours and maximize free time. The new men, much like the ancients, will rightly despise labor and instead prefer recreation, artistic pursuits and the evolution of the self.

It must be noted that just because people are no longer obligated to work for a living doesn't mean that people will do nothing at all. There will always be things to do. Communities will organize voluntary collaborative projects. If, for example, the council wants to create a botanical garden in the middle of the town, then the gardening enthusiasts will come together and lend their hand to the project; and if the council decides to build a public nature retreat in the nearby woodlands, then the outdoor enthusiasts will happily collaborate knowing that the project will benefit themselves and other townsfolk. All projects will be aimed at authentic community development. All participation will be totally voluntary. People will be able to choose to participate in projects that interest them and negotiate their own desired schedule instead of being forced to perform a task that they don't even enjoy in exchange for a paycheck for about 40 hours each week as is the case in the dystopian system of today. People will do only what they love to do and as such they will do things with much greater enthusiasm and much more efficiency than any miserable wage slave could ever do.

The emancipation through automation will undoubtedly give rise to a new era of freedom and mark the beginning of the next great «Promethean Renaissance» of the human spirit.

The freemen of the world, having shed their corporate chains, will use their new condition of leisure and freedom to ennoble themselves through philosophy and higher learning and cultivate their own creative genius. They will dedicate themselves to their passions and forge themselves into brilliant artists, gifted musicians, awesome athletes and outstanding scientists and visionaries. People will once again affirm their own aristocratic nature. Nobility will once again be the ideal to which the world aspires. The loathsome mediocrity and the mindless materialism of the modern world will be revaluated into the Promethean values of excellence, creativity and enlightenment.

The freemen of the world, having escaped from the controlling effect of money, will no longer find themselves forced to accept an imposed identity or conform to the many arbitrary rules of the private dictatorships that today are called corporations and places of employment. The need for an income will no longer serve as a means for the wealthy to control the lives of the poor. The tyranny of capital will cease to be a force of coercion. Instead, people will live as they choose and create their own values. They will act according to their own principles and become their own masters. The modern value of conformity will be revaluated into the Promethean values of individuality and self-sovereignty.

The freemen of the world, having denounced the servile moralities of the now defunct proletarian and bourgeois cultures, will follow their own passions freely and enjoy many edifying soulful experiences and moments of adventure. They will live a ludic life and practice a variety of hobbies. They will cavort joyously with friends and family and revel in many wonderful banquets and festivals with the wider community. There will no longer be moralistic notions of how people are supposed to live. Free-spiritedness will triumph. The dignity of leisure will be restored. Individual wellbeing and the desires of the soul will become more important than absurd morals and imposed duties.

Our vision of a RBE system is not rooted in the modern notion of «equality» or even in «utilitarianism». Rather it constitutes a unique synthesis of the futurological aim of an automationistic post-work society and the philosophical call to restore and reignite the great aristocratic values of the ancient world that are based on the pursuit of human excellence. The Promethean Eutopia has for its goal the aristocratization of humanity.

4.5. Autonomous Human Communities: From Elite Monopoly to Common Ownership

Today universal material abundance and the phasing out of undesirable labor through automation are already possible with existing levels of technology. The problem, however, is that much of the planet's wealth is controlled by corporate monopolies and the rest of the world is therefore beholden to their absurd system which creates artificial scarcity and forces the greater part of people into a condition of wage slavery.

Under capitalism, private banks and transnational corporations have exclusive ownership of the vast majority of the world's wealth and natural resources as well as the most important means of production. In some cases, even only a small handful of powerful oligarchies exercise near-total control over certain key industries. This extreme monopolism has only disastrous effects. It deprives people of direct access to their basic material needs. It forces everybody to submit to wage labor and serve the interests of the economic elite in exchange for a living. In truth, the fiat currency of the system has become a means of social control; the tyranny of capital inevitably coerces the have-nots into relentless servitude. In the end, those without money or employment are unable to gain access to food, shelter and energy, despite these things being physically abundant.

In 1797, Thomas Paine, a prominent Enlightenment thinker and Founding Father of the United States of America, published his famous political tract Agrarian Justice. He argued therein that the Earth is the common property and legitimate birthright of all humankind and so the wealthy landowners, who have taken for themselves vast areas of land, ought to pay «ground-rent», a tax to be used for the provision of a reasonable dividend or basic income for all citizens as compensation. Paine, an opponent of monopolism, saw the privatization of land and resources as a potential source of abject poverty and the worst injustices. Undoubtedly, Paine would be utterly appalled by the current state of modern capitalism and its overwhelming monopolies.

Monopoly and deprivation will not exist in a RBE system.

During the transition, the vast corporate monopolies and the illegitimate financial cartels will be completely dismantled and the abundant planetary resources which have been hoarded by them will be returned to the human communities and placed under the control of localized governing councils. This will allow for the establishment of public infrastructures and systems of common access. Communities will set up their own public agricultural complexes. Districts will implement their own public factories and public commons projects. In many cases, the necessary infrastructural means will already exist and those will simply be converted into public facilities and then enhanced with the most advanced automative technologies. The economy will be redesigned to serve the interests of the people. With the dissolution of the current system of monopolism and the advent of local RBE communities, all human beings will begin to benefit from a new condition of communitywide shared abundance and therefore have direct access to all of their material needs.

Of course, we make a clear distinction between Private Property and Personal Possession. The former refers to the monopolistic ownership of capital and only serves to deprive and exploit others whereas the latter denotes objects intended for personal use. Although the major industries such as food production, energy and all infrastructural capital will be under collective ownership, each individual will still have the right to own a family or personal home and reasonable plot of land as well as intimate belongings to which one has exclusive access. Let this be clear!

«Possession is a right; property is against right. Suppress property while maintaining possession.» Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (What is Property?; 1840)

Governance will take a new form. A system of localized governing councils will supersede the highly centralized forms of government of today's globalist world and there will be a definitive shift towards decentralization. Community-level and regional governments will be the norm. The governing councils will be made up of an assembly of neo-aristocrats: wise men and women chosen for their great merit, exceptional knowledge and upstanding reputation within their respective communities. These neo-aristocrats will listen to the opinions and suggestions of their people, make policy based on the most relevant information and see to the efficient running of the localized means of production and all automated systems. With the absence of money, there will no longer be any motive for political corruption and only the best people will be appointed to the assemblies.

The world of scientific research will also evolve. Benevolent «non-profit corporations» (NPCs), distinct from the corrupt profit-driven corporations of today's capitalist dystopia, will lead all kinds of scientific, technological and medical research projects, not for profit and market share, but rather for the collective benefit of the human species. The best individuals will come together voluntarily and collaborate in their project of choice, not for a mere paycheck or out of obligation, but rather because their research is their passion. Science will no longer be hindered by money. Medicine will no longer be controlled by profit-driven Big Pharma. There will be NPCs for the development of new automative technologies, futuristic architecture, medicine and surgery, genetic engineering, renewable energy sources and space exploration among many other disciplines.

The transition to a RBE system is expected to be relatively peaceful. We do not envision a bloody revolution against «class enemies» or a «dictatorship of the proletariat». We do not advocate the theft of people's possessions or the confiscation of homes and small businesses. Those are the perverse ideals and criminal acts of the dystopian ideology of Bolshevic communism which have nothing to do with our Eutopian concept of a RBE. During the transitional phase only the large corporate and financial empires will be dismantled and only their resources will be converted into public property. If you have a house or a small store that you have bought nobody is going to come to take it from you. We only intend to establish community-owned systems of production and public commons in each community and the existing modest properties of regular people do not conflict at all with this objective. The struggle is not against the middle class but only against the corporate monopolists of the economic elite who have hoarded and controlled the resources of the planet for so long.

4.6. Miscellanea: Other Goals and Ideals of the Promethean Eutopia

1. Medical Advancement and Genetic Engineering

Our Eutopian society will invest many of its resources into research for complete cures for many of the serious diseases which afflict humanity and interventions for the prevention and the reversal of aging and the correction of genetic defects. Medical science will no longer be a medium of profit like sadly it is in the present capitalist system. We support the use of pharmaceutics and genetic engineering to alleviate a large amount of human suffering, improve the quality of life of many people and raise the overall genetic fitness of the human species. Sufferers of debilitating genetic defects will no longer have to resign themselves to the fates that have been decreed to them in this life.

2. Worldwide Auxiliary Language

We advocate the designing and the introduction of a worldwide auxiliary language or an «interlanguage» as a perfected medium of communication that will serve to connect the different nations and linguistic regions of the planet and facilitate a higher level of intellectual discourse on an international scale. We envision that the language will establish itself as the de facto lingua franca between all of the heterogeneous peoples of our conceived future Eutopian order and promote a great increase of human interconnectivity throughout the whole world. The worldwide interlanguage will coexist with the current national languages and become like a second native language for people of all nationalities. Our vision of a planetary language could be a proactive solution to the problem of the Babeldom of speech.

The design of the interlanguage must consider the following points of euphony, lexical wealth, optimal grammar and creative potential for word building. The new tongue must hold pleasant and harmonious phonetic qualities and be relatively easy to pronounce for most speakers. Its lexicon or wordstock must be sufficiently vast, deep, precise and suitable for high-level philosophical and scientific discourse. Its grammatical structure must be logical and moderate, neither too complex nor too simplistic. Finally, it must possess an inherent innovative plasticity that allows for virtually unlimited coinages and specialized terms as well as poetic and literary creativity.

How will the new planetary language be constructed? What will be its lexical and grammatical basis? This matter is an object of debate and there exist various options. Linguists could engineer a modified form of one of the great classical languages such as Latin or Sanskrit. That way our interlanguage would not only possess a naturalistic appearance but it would also enjoy a high degree of historical legitimacy (I consider that all projects for a constructed auxiliary language have failed thus far precisely because of their excessive artificiality). Our own proposal is «Latinida» or «Latina Mundiale» which constitutes a naturalistic restoration of Latin with various morphological and syntactic simplifications for ease of use in the sphere of international communication.

3. Space Exploration

The furtherance of our understanding of the physics of the universe and the development of more advanced space travel technologies will also be noble goals of our new civilization.

A Worldwide Space Program, one of international magnitude, will lead important research projects concerning propulsion technologies, asteroid mining, extraterrestrial colonization and faster-than-light (superluminal) interstellar voyage. We intend for humankind to become an advanced space-faring civilization.